'India's S&T talent pool is just top-notch'

Pothik GhoshOct 30, 2007, 05.54am IST

Innovation at Xerox is about the unfettered intellectual and experimental daring of scientists to try and go beyond the current frontiers of technology. ET met Sophie Vandebroek , Xerox's chief technology officer, at its European Research Center, Grenoble, France, to learn more about the company's R&D strategy — especially vis-a-vis its developing markets' operations.

How have projections of a paperless office space impacted your R&D programme?

That, in effect, hasn't happened as fast as any of us really assumed it would. And if you saw the numbers, you would see that if anything, within the office and the enterprise, and publishing, printing will increase more and more. And the reason is that the explosion of the internet has created so many more digital documents that even though most of it is not printed, people print more and print a lot of these electronic pages that are being created. A lot is for temporary use.

In product publishing again, the total number of pages might be about slightly less than earlier, but what is happening is some of the offset pages are becoming digital. And assuming that digital printing would be growing overall, we are rebalancing our portfolio to be much more focused on 'the smart and intelligent document space'. That is meant to help our customers work more in the digital world, and have much less need for printing, and also help them simplify their document and business processes.

For example, to help lawyers, who have to deal with millions of pages, to quickly scan documents in digital format and analyse their content to answer key questions. Or, help them categorise between things that are not relevant and those that are. Or, help them through redaction to protect confidential information contained in documents. So, we are doing a lot of research that has nothing to do with hard-copy documentation anymore.

It's often said that Xerox's capabilities to translate its cutting-edge research into commercially marketable products do not quite match.

What happens, if you hire extremely bright people in all these research centres, is that you always have many more ideas than you could possibly commercialise. Many of the great inventions — like laser printing —came from our stable. We invented the Ethernet, which we first commercialised, and, of course, the mouse-driven PC. But in 1991 we decided as a company to get out of the PC business.

So, there are always going to be more inventions, and that both makes this job amazingly interesting and also very difficult because you have to place your bets on the right technology. We have done a couple of things in the last decade to really make sure that we really leverage the innovations that are happening. One thing we did was to closely integrate the research and the transfer processes to the business groups. So, part of our funding and research comes from individual business groups.

Also, we have specifically incorporated our Palo Alto Research Center. It's wholly owned by Xerox but it's incorporated so they have IP protection and do research not only for Xerox but also other independent clients. That apart, PARC also helps incubate start-ups, they share their technologies with start-ups to create completely different companies.

How different are the needs of your developing markets, vis-a-vis your traditional markets?

They overlap closely. For example, we have one business wing that focuses on small and medium businesses — businesses of everything from a single lawyer's or doctor's office to businesses with a couple of dozen or hundred people. And also the needs of small and medium businesses in the western world are closely aligned to the kind of products and services that the developing world needs. However, there are unique needs in the developing world.

Wouldn't it then make more sense for you to set up R&D facilities in those developing markets?

You are right, but the point is we cannot have, for instance, 12 research centres. My hope is we are able to work actively with good higher education institutions in those countries. We are doing open innovation by actively working with IIT Madras. We have also reached out to IIT Delhi, but we haven't finalised yet which university to work with.

But my hope is that the local team, if indeed it works with the local universities in India, would come up with inventions that are applicable in South America and Africa, too. But I'm not quite sure how much the concept there would be more applicable than the concept invented in California.

Even in our research centre in California, or in Rochester, we have a lot of top-notch Indian researchers. The quality of people in China, and Russia, and India is just top-notch. The issue might be one of availability, though. In a country like India there are not many PhDs as graduates each and every year.

What shifts in the domain of media-publishing-communication is indicated by the current direction of your R&D?

Beside easy accessibility of news and videos through things like pop-cans, blogs and the Youtube on the lap-top, there is a shift to heavily personalised communications — you can be enabled to have your personalised google links, and your personalised New York Times information. So, how can publishers personalise their magazines for their readers?

I might be loyal to a magazine, but I always look up the same few sections, there are some sections I do not read at all. So, how could technology enable you as publisher to target your content to your readers better? And that's exactly my vision: to create a publishing praxis that could make it low-cost to the end-user, profitable to the printers as well as advertisers.